On 15 August 1961 he found himself, aged 19, guarding the Berlin Wall, then in its third day of construction, at the corner of Ruppinerstraße and Bernauerstraße. At that stage of construction, the Berlin Wall was only a low barbed wire fence. As the people on the Western side shouted Komm rüber! (“come over”), Schumann jumped the barbed wire and was driven away at high speeds by a waiting West Berlin police car. Photographer Peter Leibing captured a photograph of his escape on film and it became a well-known image of the Cold War.

Schumann was later permitted to travel from West Berlin to the main territory of West Germany, where he settled in Bavaria. He met his wife Kunigunde in the town of Günzburg.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall he said, “Only since 9 November 1989 have I felt truly free”. Even so, he continued to feel more at home in Bavaria than in his birthplace, citing old frictions with his former colleagues, and he even hesitated about visiting his parents and brothers and sisters in Saxony. On 20 June 1998, suffering from depression, he hanged himself in his orchard near the town of Kipfenberg in Oberbayern.

(Source: r-i-o-t, via varjaak-deactivated20120308)

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   TODAY IN HISTORY — The fall of the Berlin Wall. On 15 August 1961 he found himself, aged 19, guarding the Berlin Wall,...

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    This is why I love history. I could read stories about individuals like this for hours. This was so interesting.

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    People so seldom talk about his later life.

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